Here is a novel that could so easily have been loud. It is set among large events: the fight for Indian independence and the second world war. It features characters from history who enter the lives of the novel’s fictional characters, often to dramatic effect – the poet Rabindranath Tagore, the singer Begum Akhtar, the dancer and critic Beryl de Zoete and the German painter and curator Walter Spies. It has at its heart a young boy whose mother leaves him to live in another country, and whose father responds to this crisis by also leaving the child for an extended period of time, and who is later imprisoned for his anti-British activism. There are many reasons to turn up the volume dial.

But readers of Anuradha Roy, whose previous novel Sleeping on Jupiter was longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker prize, know that shoutiness or showiness is never her style. She is a writer of great subtlety and intelligence, who understands that emotional power comes from the steady accretion of detail. Amid all the great events and characters of history, she chooses as her narrator a horticulturalist known throughout by his nickname, Myshkin – “a man who chose neither pen nor sword but a trowel”.

Myshkin is nine years old when his mother leaves him and his father in the fictitious Indian town of Muntazir, and embarks on a new life with Spies. Muntazir is 20 or so miles from the Himalayan foothills, and its name means, in Urdu, “one who waits impatiently”. After his mother’s departure, Myshkin’s life is spent anxiously waiting – for her letters to arrive, for her to return. In later years, he compares that waiting to “blood being drained away from our bodies until one day there was no more left”.

Myshkin is a man seeking to understand why his mother, Gayatri, made the choice she did

The older Myshkin, a man in his 60s, narrates the story. He is the adult version of the child whose blood drained away, now living quietly, more at home among trees than people. In the course of this deliberately self-contained life, a bulky envelope arrives one day. It has something to do with his mother, he knows, and he cannot bring himself either to open it or to throw it away. Instead, his narration takes us back to his mother’s childhood, and then to his own childhood. He is a man seeking to understand why his mother, Gayatri, made the choice she did – and to this end he delves into the unusual freedom of her adolescence, compared with the rigidity and constraint of her married existence in 1930s India.

She was an artist and dancer married to a man who saw dance as scandalous and art as irrelevant, particularly when set against the great matters of history in which he chose to be involved as a member of an anticolonial organisation, the Society for Indian Patriots. Into her world steps Spies, bringing with him new possibilities. (It would be best for the unknowing reader not to search out biographical details on Spies – knowing them might detract from some of the surprises of the plot.)

But Gayatri’s own life and art and Myskhin’s memories of his parents’ marriage are not sufficient to explain to him why his mother did what she did. He looks for answers elsewhere, searching in literature for insight into the tensions between women’s desires and the world’s expectations of them. To this end, the novel gives some space to discussing the Indian poet Maitreyi Devi, who wrote about her early romance with the Romanian writer Mircea Eliade. It’s perhaps the only point in the book that doesn’t feel entirely well judged – Devi’s story could have done with occupying either far more, or less, space in the story, but even so it adds to our understanding of Myshkin’s quality of searching, the wound inside him that won’t ever heal.

Part of Roy’s skill as a writer is shown in her ability to reveal the awful consequences of Gayatri’s choices while retaining great compassion for those choices. This novel is not interested in condemning absent mothers. By contrast, Roy is refreshingly unimpressed by the anti-imperial activities of Myshkin’s father – who seeks freedom from being ruled while behaving like a tyrant in his own home. The world that rewards men for their public actions and forgives them their private cruelties, placing national politics above gender politics, is one that Roy slices through in her prose, though always obliquely.

Anuradha Roy wins 2016 DSC prize for south Asian literature

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All the Lives We Never Lived is set largely in the early part of the 20th century, with some sections in the 1990s. It does not directly refer to #MeToo or the macho hyper-nationalism of today’s India. But in its portrayal of power structures, it is part of those very contemporary political conversations. It is also a beautifully written and compelling story of how families fall apart and of what remains in the aftermath.

•Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (Bloomsbury) is the winner of this year’s Women’s prize for fiction. All the Lives We Never Lived is published by MacLehose. To order a copy for £12.99 (RRP £16.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.